Why I Changed My Mind About Technology

The allure of technology is hard to ignore. It has the power to seduce human imagination, pandering visions of the future that appeal to the wants and desires of the many. But technology has a darker side, most of it is developed behind closed doors and without proper regard to the higher-order consequences of mass adoption. It happens so often, that people let technology into their lives hoping for relief from the burdens of everyday, only to find their suffering transformed into troubles of a different kind. By the time people realize the trade-off, however, it's too late. Once a technology becomes entrenched in the cultural vernacular, adoption is hard to reverse.

Consider the twentieth-century adoption of new transportation technology. The motorcar spread around the globe like wildfire and the infrastructure needed to drive them tore through our cities in a way that is hard to reverse. Freeway construction demolished homes and neighborhoods — entire livelihoods — in the name of progress, leaving urban centers scarred and divided. Car-related noise, pollution, and death have become chronic everyday ills. The reckoning continues a full 100 years after the introduction of mass-produced automobiles, with no end in sight... What questions could we have asked then, that we should be asking today about new technologies? Why couldn't we predict the traffic jam back when we imagined the automobile?

I want to describe the pattern: People don't like it when there is any complication standing between them and the things or the outcomes they want. Such complications are typically regarded as "problems" that can be solved with technology, and so people develop technology to that effect. Modern engineering is so good that the technologies we create work like magic at solving the intended problems (sometimes, it's hard to believe). With time, however, the trade-off becomes evident: The mass adoption of any technology leads to cultural changes that become new problems of their own, modern troubles we didn't use to have and that we must now find solutions for and often can't. The pattern invariably ends with the realization that the technology people were once so hopeful about turned too good to be true.

The pattern repeated again with single-use plastics: Beverage bottles made with PET (like Coke and Pepsi) brought with them a new era of everyday convenience. Accessible everywhere, with no need to be washed or stored after use, but also fostering a culture of careless disposal that has become a major ecological problem and has overwhelmed waste disposal systems worldwide. Meanwhile, the companies responsible for plastic pollution keep accelerating production, eclipsing global efforts to solve the problem through recycling and reprocessing. The convenience of single-use plastics was too good to be true.

The same goes with digital and Internet technologies. Online marketplaces like Airbnb produced a fresh supply of affordable accommodation for an increasingly travel-savvy generation while creating new streams of income for everyday homeowners. A new culture was born of converting long-term housing to Airbnb rentals at the expense of the local housing supply. The illusion of endless choice for travelers was too good to be true. Today, the extent to which Airbnb has contributed to housing shortages all across America remains contested, but officials in New York and other major metros have already taken measures to limit the harms of the technology.

We have been warned of the dangers too many times: Technology changes our relationship with the world – it transforms the way people relate to the environment and the communities they belong to, deeply changing the role we play in our own lives and the lives of others. But time and again we have ignored it... because new technology is fascinating (!) Sadly, the allure is hard to resist when it works like magic. But in the wake of our accelerating technological revolution, it is in people's best interest to balance technology optimism with a healthy dose of skepticism, even a hint of pessimism. Surprisingly, advocating a mindful approach to the development and release of technological forms is often conflated with opposing progress and innovation. Meanwhile, everyday people all around the world keep suffering the higher-order consequences of carelessly deployed technologies.

We have no reason to be grateful to those who change the world but don’t make it better. – Andrew McLuhan (2023)

⚭ Topic Nexus

• What is Technology?

• What is Capitalism?

• What is Media?